Banks are owned and operated by assholes

Sheriff Thomas J. Dart of Cook County, Illinois, is ceasing all evictions. He is doing this because most of the eviction notices are against rental properties, where the person failing to pay the mortgage doesn’t actually live. Instead, he winds up evicting tenants. Even those who pay the rent every month. According to Dart, mortgage companies are supposed to identify a building’s occupants before asking for an eviction. But they aren’t doing that, so he’s ceasing the eviction process.The bank’s response?

“The reality is that by ignoring the law and his legal responsibilities, he is carrying out ‘vigilantism’ at the highest level of an elected official,” [the Illinois Bankers Association] said. “The Illinois banking industry is working hard to help troubled homeowners in many ways, but Sheriff Dart’s declaration of ‘martial law’ should not be tolerated.”

So in their own words, they don’t care about tenants at all. They’re working hard to help the landlords. But if the landlord can’t be helped, they’ll just shove good rent-paying people into the street without a thought or a care.

“I told them, ‘You send an agent out, you send somebody out that gives me any type of assurance that the appropriate person is in the house, I will fulfill the order.’

“When you’re blindly sending me out to houses where I’m coming across innocent tenant after innocent tenant, I can’t keep doing this and have a good conscience about it.”